Trump just shook up America’s war on TikTok

If there’s one thing that unites an otherwise bitterly divided US Congress, it’s China. That’s why a planned vote this week that would force China’s ByteDance to either divest its US TikTok business or be banned from operating in the US has a reasonable prospect of being passed.

The congressional House energy and commerce committee approved the bill unanimously, 50-0, last week after receiving classified briefings on the security risks to Americans of the popular social media platform, owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance.

The US is concerned about the potential of a Chinese entity to exploit its user base –  about 170 million of TikTok’s billion-plus monthly users are Americans – to try to influence US government policy.Credit: AP

That’s despite its US data being hosted on Oracle servers in Texas, being majority owned by non-Chinese investors, including US investors, and many of its most senior executives being based outside China.

The likelihood of the House approving the legislation was strengthened by a furious lobbying campaign by ByteDance, with TikTok users flooding congressional phone lines after being urged to by messages on the platform, which used their postcodes to connect them to the phone numbers for their congressional representatives.

That campaign didn’t go down well, reinforcing concerns about the potential of a Chinese entity to exploit its user base – about 170 million of TikTok’s billion-plus monthly users are Americans – to try to influence US government policy.

While there is near-unanimity among House Democrats, Republicans and the Biden White House over concerns that TikTok could be directed by China’s government, under Chinese laws, to provide access to the vast troves of user data the platform collects, the picture in the Senate, where there is some hesitation about the first amendment implications of banning the app, isn’t as clear.

The potential fate of the bill has also been muddied by a last-minute intervention by Donald Trump.

Trump, who in 2020, while president, issued an executive order banning TikTok from operating in the US that was later blocked by the courts, now says he no longer supports a ban because it would increase support for Facebook, which he described as “an enemy of the people”.

Facebook, of course, banned Trump from its platform for two years after the January 6 conflict at the Capitol. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife also donated more than $US300 million ($453 million) to enhance access to voting in the 2020 election, which Trump lost.

Trump, attempting to regain the presidency he lost to Biden, may also be seeking to use the issue to try to attract the young voters who dominate usage of TikTok’s platform. He has denied being influenced by a recent meeting with major ByteDance investor and Republican donor Jeff Yass.

Should the bill be passed by Congress and survive any ByteDance challenges it would only add to the continuing distancing of the US from an increasingly assertive China.Credit: AP

The Biden White House had direct involvement in the development of the bill, even though Joe Biden revoked the Trump executive order and replaced it with one ordering a review of all apps owned or controlled by entities from foreign jurisdictions seen as inimical to the US. Biden has said he will sign the bill if it is passed by Congress.

ByteDance has signalled that it will challenge the legislation, if it is enacted, on constitutional grounds, saying the US was trying to strip 170 million Americans of their first amendment rights to free expression. The bill would damage millions of businesses, deny artists an audience and destroy the livelihoods of countless creators, it has said.

The US isn’t the only country concerned about ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok, the amounts and range of user data it collects, and China’s laws (as if they were needed) to order any Chinese company to give the government access to their data.

Like the US, where government officials and the military are already banned from accessing TikTok, governments in Australia, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, France and the European Commission have also directed their officials not to download the app to their phones. India has a blanket ban on all Chinese-controlled apps.

China itself has shown concern about the ability of social media and other technologies to be exploited for intelligence gathering. It has banned Facebook, X and YouTube from operating within China and banned or severely restricted what other platforms, like Google, are able to do. It’s even banned Chinese-built Teslas from entering government sites because of the location and data-collecting capabilities the vehicles have.

With the TikTok app capable of tracking everything from users’ locations to their contacts and rapidly building out e-commerce links with retailers and suppliers, its access to vast, intrusive and ever-increasing amounts of user data is similarly seen as a threat to privacy and national security.

There’s also a concern, heightened by a disproportionate airing of pro-Palestinian sentiment after Hamas’ October 7 horrific incursion into Israel and Israel’s deadly response, that the app can be used to spread misinformation and influence opinion to align it with China’s strategic interests.

Donald Trump has changed his tune on TikTok. Credit: AP

ByteDance’s critics have accused TikTok of spreading anti-semitism and promoting pro-Palestinian content. While the youthful nature of its user base would tend to produce a bias towards the Palestinians, comparisons with other social media platforms suggest that bias is materially greater on TikTok than elsewhere.

ByteDance will inevitably challenge the legislation, if it passes through both chambers of Congress, so it could be years before the issue is resolved.

Losing the US market would be such a major blow to ByteDance’s global business and ambitions that it will inevitably fight the legislation all the way to the US Supreme Court.

The draft legislation gives the company until September 30 this year to divest its US business or face a ban from operating in the US, which presumably would be enforced by banning it from US app stores and, perhaps, by telcos preventing it from being downloaded directly.

A sale in that timeframe wouldn’t be straightforward, given that the major US social media companies would face anti-trust obstacles and that the estimated price tag of $US40 billion to $US50 billion would limit the range of prospective buyers.

That there is already a major US presence on ByteDance’s register might, of course, reduce the amount of funding required from new investors.

Should the bill be passed by Congress and survive any ByteDance challenges it would only add to the continuing distancing of the US from an increasingly assertive China, a distancing that started during the Trump presidency with Trump’s trade wars and which has accelerated and had a more strategic focus under Biden.

If Trump were to regain the presidency in November, rather than some selective distancing of the two economies it is likely that there would be the far more comprehensive and near-complete decoupling that Trump and the China hawks and isolationists who surrounded him in his first term – and who still travel alongside him today – once sought.

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